jay powell served as top official at the treasury department under president george herbert walker bush and has studied the potential consequences for the independent bipartisan policy center. he joins us now. jay, what does happen when time runs out, whether it's august 1st, august 3rd, what do we see happening? the bond holders are going to be paid so what kind of choices does the president have to make? >> that's exactly what we see. we see if the debt ceiling's not raised by august 2, starting on august 3 and for the rest of the month, we assume the bond holders will be paid their interest. we assume there's not much risk on that. but that other creditors who are beneficiaries of federal government payments, approximately half of those won't be able to be paid, 50% of other government payments, there won't be the cash to pay them. and we tried many experiments. you can't cut 50% overnight without eliminating many, many popular, important programs. we tried. you can't do it. >> social security might be a separate issue because there are a lot of technical reasons why the trust funds